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Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works
Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"
I think Google operates on the "if anyone can see it, it can be indexed" line of thought...
That is, if anyone can find News Corp data on Bing, then Google's web crawlers should be able to as well.
The end result is Google will still index all public content via Bing, and Microsoft will pay out the ass until they wisen up.
Or Microsoft could require viewers to login to Bing, but that would kinda limit the exposure to the material... which is a pretty good thing for mankind when you consider this includes quality "news" outlets like FOX News.
I don't know if there have ever been any legal decisions about the legality of indexing publically available info... I'm guessing this would be the easiest move for Google. Or they might do something very radical that no one expects...
Interesting thing is that this will also limit how much Google can spend on their side products, which are direct competition against Office. About Chrome OS vs. Windows I wouldn't worry so much, as Chrome OS wont run any other programs on the computer than a web browser.
Lots of people always seem to note that this wouldn't hurt Google because if people want news from certain sites they just go to the site directly. But truth is, it's a lot easier to find the news you're looking for from search engine. If you spot theres a news site you think is good quality, then you go to it.
Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there. This is even more true with both Bing's and Google's News search. Bing is starting to be nicer to use than Google, has nifty features (like providing useful results from Wolfram Alpha, integrating Wikipedia nicely, etc) and the search results quality is on par with Google. Bing is also more stylish than Google for "casual people", but while maintaining Google-like simple interface.
And before someone has to jump on the "but only reason people use Bing is because it's default search engine in IE8!". This is no different tactic to gain users what Google uses too. They pay Firefox, Opera and other browsers and even computer manufacturers like Dell to have Google as the default search engine. But neither party overwrites the previous setting, like many seem to say about IE8 - it doesn't change it if Google is already set there.
Google is even more problematic because of the amount of datamining they do. Their analytics tracking code is everywhere on the internet, with Android and Chrome OS you are always logged-in to your Google account (just to use your phone, wtf?). Both Bing and Google do some hidden datamining on back too (like when you click a link, theres javascript that sends info about what link you clicked on the back). But this is worse with Google, as their complete business model relies around datamining to provide info and services to advertisers.
It's actually interesting how much they have improved their search engine from MSN/Live age. Seems they're going after Google at full force now and it seems to make sense to attack them from every direction now.
I'm pretty sure that Murdoch will hate M$ for this step. No, I'm serious.
He's in the publishing industry. In other words: Perception and stories are his trade. The whole "Google is stealing from us" angle is an excellent story and contains a number of great opportunities to profit (from the government if you threaten loss of jobs, from Google if you threaten lawsuits, etc.) - but what M$ is doing is essentially calling his bluff.
Now he'll either have to go along with it, and de-index his sites, which will result in page views coming down crashing, or have everyone and his dog dig out the old stories and say "wasn't so bad after all, was it, old liar?".
He's probably already busy trying to find a way out without loss of face.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
what is the legal status of NOT honoring a robot.txt, at least hypothetically?
or for that matter, simply linking to another website who has told you "don't link to me"
in other words, if someone says don't link to me, and you link to them, is that a matter of illegality or is there a legal basis for someone to sue in civil court? on what grounds?
its a valid question. and certainly one with broad reaching ramifications
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There sure is some strange logic in this deal, especially from the news moguls. 99,9% of all searches regarding news or a topic is about getting information about it regardless of the source.
When someone do a search for something, the quality of the pages is the interesting part, not where those pages resides. If its pointing to a blogger, Wikipedia or a newspaper is totally irrelevant just as long as the information is correct. By removing their own content the newspapers are only encouraging bloggers and the like.
I cant see people jumping ship towards Bing to get better results. Its much more likely people will be put off when any search on Bing leads to a paying newspaper instead of to that blog you want to find.
HTTP/1.1 400
If anything, this one is a killer deal!
3. I'm sure the sites that will replace NewsCorp properties in the searches can't believe that Christmas came early.
this is the real point that will be tested. is there intrinsic value in news production and presentation or not? if so then google has been getting a free ride on others valuable content. if not then this will bear out as a failure for newscorp.
I suspect newscorp is right. but I could be wrong. Th eevidence for this is that cable will pay to have Fox. And people will pay to have the WSJ. ANd people were willing to pay for sky news even when BBC was free.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I wonder if Microsoft isn't entering its "post-evil" phase. I have a personal hypothesis that large corporations that last long enough will eventually enter a phase where they've made all the money they can out of evil, and will then start to explore areas where doing good things can also make them money. My canonical example of this is IBM. A company that has lasted a good long time doing evil things (up to and including allegedly selling tabulating machines to the Nazis -- Microsoft's evil is small-time compared to that), but that found that its evil business was drying up and decided to start making money from good actions like throwing support behind Open Source. Kind of like Dr. Evil returning from his long sleep to find that his legitimate business interests are making more money than his evil schemes can.
Of course, it could be that since Gates handed the reins over to Ballmer, Microsoft has entered a "directionless wandering" phase, where much of their directionless wandering looks like "good things," more or less by accident.
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Microsoft is discussing paying News Corporation for the media company to remove its websites from Google and have them exclusively searchable via Microsoft Bob Hope, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct an online business model that adequately replaces vast local monopoly ad revenues.
Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman, has said that he would use legal methods to prevent Google "stealing stories" published in his papers, including allowing Microsoft to pay him to add Google to a robots.txt file. "I'm always happy to do a deal with a careful, considered bloke like Steve Ballmer. His restraint is well-known, and he certainly wouldn't blow a massive cash surplus — I'm sorry, that's now a massive debt surplus — in a series of Hail Mary passes to try to fight Google on its heavily-defended high ground. His decision to give me buckets of cash is entirely reasonable and should be encouraged."
Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google. "Wow," said the Wikimedia Foundation, "we could get a million dollars for our charitable and educational site not to be findable in Google! Tell you what, we'll get back to you sometime maybe never. Have you considered an exclusive deal with Conservapedia? They'd fit right in with Fox News. Sorry, did I say that with my outside voice?"
Microsoft is aiming for a direct assault on Google to put pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. "Google's abuse of their position is legendary," said Mr Ballmer. "Ninety-five percent of desktop computers are running Windows, most people are browsing with Internet Explorer and only ten percent of those use our Bob Hope search engine. The only possible explanation is Google abusing its monopoly to make people type 'google.com' into their address bar and not just leave it at the default Microsoft search. The fiends!"
Google did not comment for this story, being too busy snickering and selling installations of Gmail and Google Applications to businesses sick of Office and Windows upgrades.
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